Re: Haida and Na-Dene
Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:37 pm
I'm not very familiar with South America, but that theory certainly makes sense for North America.
I may not have stated the original point clearly enough, which was that hunter-gatherers don't form empires, thus the language diversity is higher.Xephyr wrote:I don't know much about horse nomadism, but isn't it the prevailing theory nowadays that the Indo-European expansion was driven more by domestication of sheeps/goats and less by marauding charioteers? See also: the famously nonexistent rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops.zompist wrote:Honestly I don't know much about reindeer herding, but for discussing language group expansion, the question is whether it allows empires, as horse nomadism does.
To be honest, "barren and uninhabitable" describes only the most extreme parts of Siberia, which, for all we know, may not have had as harsh conditions as they do now until relatively recently. I mean, some people stuck to their homes for as long as they could even during the last ice age while others continued moving about all over the place, so it makes more sense to me for the people who stayed to have developed highly divergent languages due to isolation and to be more influenced by whatever other languages they came in contact with. Adding to that the possibility of a civilisation or two (or more) that continued to live as nomads in the northernmost parts of the world throughout the ice age, using the ice to spread over an even larger area, I'm pretty sure small populations would have settled many of the most habitable regions for an easier life independently of one another, which would probably overlap with the people who already lived there because the most habitable regions would naturally be inhabited already, and as a result their languages would influence one another unless one group killed all of the other group or they became assimilated. The former seems unlikely, and the latter could result in a creole that eventually becomes so different from either parent language that it's difficult to see/hear clear similarities.Salmoneus wrote:All this in an area where you'd think there'd be simplicity: barren and uninhabitable until relative recently, and a series of coherent climatological bands that ought to encourage big huge language families covering the whole area, just like Uralic did to the west.
I feel stupid asking this, but what's TM&T?Xephyr wrote:I tend to hear from outsiders that Core Altaic "was disproven decades ago" or some dismissive thing like that, whereas I almost never see that same attitude from actual specialists TM&T
For some inexplicable reason, it does seem ancient; from what little information there is about it, it seems to have that quality of a language that the dinosaurs would have spoken if they had spoken.8Deer wrote:Interestingly, Haida Gwaii was one of those inhabitable areas, so maybe Haida is really ancient.
zompist wrote:Reindeer are not horses...
Well, they could have served as tributes from one tribe to another for a variety of purposes like agreements to protect each other from invaders and to share in times of famine, etc. which, while it doesn't provide a military advantage, does provide a more stable ground for the survival of diversity if it is continued over the years. They could also be given as gifts to more dominant cultures to retain autonomy even if their lands were conquered, because even if reindeer herding is relatively easy compared to horse archery and whatnot, how would someone who has never seen a reindeer in his life know that? And, even if they did, why would an expanding empire invest in adapting it alongside their already functional society when they could just have the people that already herd reindeers herd reindeers like they've always done, only taking the side profits (meat, warm clothing, etc.) and maybe recruiting/enslaving the herders for other work?zompist wrote:I'm sure they provide more sustenance than foraging, but do they provide any military advantage?
Does it have to? I am confused, because to me, you seem to be going back and forth over whether pastoralism's advantage-- the advantage that lets people form into large, sprawled, linguistically homogeneous areas-- is a military one or not. You acknowledged that the pastoral advantage had by the Central Asian Indo-Europeans and African Bantus was one of simple animal herding/husbandry, right? That's what allowed those two language phyla to spread out so quickly and eradicate the previous linguistic diversity of their respective zones. I'm proposing a similar situation for the Paleo-Siberians and their reindeer: no marauding charioteers, no rhino-mounted shock troops, and no reindeer-drawn war sleighs.zompist wrote:Reindeer are not horses... I'm sure they provide more sustenance than foraging, but do they provide any military advantage?
Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. And yeah, what you describe sounds like my experience, too: everybody agrees that Altaic is nonsense and pseudoscience and bunk and nobody believes it anymore... until you read stuff written by people who actually study those languages. Then all that (to put it strongly) blithe dismissal goes away.Vlürch wrote:I feel stupid asking this, but what's TM&T?
Dunno about the other stuff, but the god/spirit part of Wakantanka is the "wakan" bit. "Tȟaŋka" just means "big"; it comes from Proto-Siouan *ihtąka.Personally, though, I'd understand if people made fun of me, considering I think it's possible that there's some underlying cause for words for concepts of divinity, "big blue" and/or "mysterious things" to be similar in unrelated languages like Sumerian dingir (god, sky), Proto-Turkic *t`aŋgiri (god), Māori Tangaroa (the god of the sea), Lakota Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka (the great spirit), and maybe even Galo taŋar (mist), Amis taŋal (head), or that those languages are all related somehow, maybe by them having had contact with one another and/or an as-of-yet-unidentified language that introduced those words to them.
Oh, duh. It's obvious now that you said it.Xephyr wrote:Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic.Vlürch wrote:I feel stupid asking this, but what's TM&T?
Interesting.Xephyr wrote:Dunno about the other stuff, but the god/spirit part of Wakantanka is the "wakan" bit. "Tȟaŋka" just means "big"; it comes from Proto-Siouan *ihtąka.
Well, Amazonia has clusters of (apparently) small families in the most remote corners. But pretty much all of it is taken up by four big families, three of which are probably all one family, and which seem to have expanded dramatically relatively recently. And in Australia, it's all one family too, apart from the periphery, where again there are microfamilies.zompist wrote:Yeah, if you don't pay attention to Greenberg & Ruhlen.Salmoneus wrote:Really, the whole area is sort of weird. Do we have any analogous areas in the world with so many seemingly unrelated extensive language families?
The Paleosiberians were hunter-gatherers, fishermen, and reindeer herders. So it's best to look at other areas where hunter-gatherers predominate, such as Australia and Amazonia. Both are characterized by very high language diversity. (In the case of Australia, the situation is obfuscated by wide-scale borrowing. I don't know if this applies to Siberia.)
The Chukotko-Kamchatkans managed to expand to cover a large area despite being hunter-gatherers - the reindeer were only introduced later, from the Yukaghir, and only adopted by some groups. Iirc Chuckchi legends frame the Yukaghir as the murderous invading bastards taking their lands from the west - it's possible than CK territory originally was even larger, before they began to adopt the Yukaghir lifestyle.Xephyr wrote:But only the Dene-Yeniseian were hunter-gatherers! Everyone else has (or are descended from those who had) reindeer herding pastoralism. Why should that not benefit them like goat/sheep pastoralism did the Indo-Aryans & Tocharians and cattle & agriculture did the Bantu? Because if it does (and according to Vajda, for the Paleo-Siberians it did), then we should not expect to find a high level of linguistic diversity, and if we do find such a high level then Salmoneus' surprise is well-founded. (Unless we don't, by optimistically rooting for lumping hypotheses.)
I'm going off of a very dim memory from a youtube recording of a lecture Vajda gave years ago, so I could easily be wrong, but I remembered him saying that all the non-Yeniseian Siberians (including the CK) ancestrally migrated north because of the reindeer. You're probably right, though.Salmoneus wrote:The Chukotko-Kamchatkans managed to expand to cover a large area despite being hunter-gatherers - the reindeer were only introduced later, from the Yukaghir, and only adopted by some groups. Iirc Chuckchi legends frame the Yukaghir as the murderous invading bastards taking their lands from the west - it's possible than CK territory originally was even larger, before they began to adopt the Yukaghir lifestyle.
Multiple migrations=multiple languages/language families=more diversity? Plus a greater time depth means more time for languages to diversify. Geography is probably a huge factor too. The Pacific coast, especially of Alaska and BC, is incredibly rugged, so I doubt travel would have been "easy" by any means. This sort of ruggedness might explain why language communities on the NWC tend to be so small (geographically speaking, in pre-contact times the population was quite high compared to the rest of the continent).Salmoneus wrote: And the antiquity of the pacific coast doesn't explain anything - in fact, it poses more questions. If the pacific coast was, as seems reasonable, such an easy route for travel, why is that where we see the most diversity?
The problem is that linguists have tended to find what they were looking for, which is big IE-style families. Lumping is exciting and splitting is not, but Greenberg's overreach has caused a lot of reexamination, and a lot of the lumping was shoddy work. Thus Campbell's book listing over a hundred language families in the Americas. Further work will undoubtedly lower the number, but we can't unduly anticipate. As for Australia, Dixon is quite dubious about Pama-Nyungan. As I said, there is a cultural practice of massive borrowing, driven by taboos on dead people's names as well as other forms of mixing. The assumption that a bunch of resemblances mean a genetic linguistic family breaks down in these circumstances.Salmoneus wrote:Well, Amazonia has clusters of (apparently) small families in the most remote corners. But pretty much all of it is taken up by four big families, three of which are probably all one family, and which seem to have expanded dramatically relatively recently. And in Australia, it's all one family too, apart from the periphery, where again there are microfamilies.
But there is a big difference between a) i) number of language families in total (i.e. including each isolate or cluster of little-spoken related languages as a new family) and ii) number of dominant families in an area (i.e. taking the area as a whole and leaving occasional isolated valleys and creeks to one side), and b) i) 'the Americas' and ii) 'Amazonia'.zompist wrote: The problem is that linguists have tended to find what they were looking for, which is big IE-style families. Lumping is exciting and splitting is not, but Greenberg's overreach has caused a lot of reexamination, and a lot of the lumping was shoddy work. Thus Campbell's book listing over a hundred language families in the Americas.
Well sure, if you want to assume there aren't any large language families in 'primitive' areas, you can refuse to believe otherwise until you're shown incontrovertible proof. But a more neutral position would just be to accept the balance of probabilities. Kaufman's "radically conservative" classification recognises Tupian, Cariban, Maipurean and Je as definite (either demonstrated or just immediately apparent) and Macro-Je as "probable" but not yet proven (but this was written up in the 1980s) - he also notes that every single classifier has agreed on Macro-Je in principle (though not on all the proposed members). Numerous researchers have connected Tupian and Carib, for decades, and some also Macro-Je - the latest attempts claim to have demonstrated shared irregular mophology, as well as the considerable lexical and morphological elements shared between the three.Further work will undoubtedly lower the number, but we can't unduly anticipate.
Yes, but everybody else disagrees with him. As in, vituperously disagrees with him. "extravagantly and spectacularly erroneous... wrong-headed... so bizarrely faulted, and such an insult to the eminently successful practitioners of Comparative Method Linguistics in Australia, that it positively demands a decisive riposte."As for Australia, Dixon is quite dubious about Pama-Nyungan.
Would it be, though, when you consider that these are also languages we don't have that much data on yet?Salmoneus wrote:Well sure, if you want to assume there aren't any large language families in 'primitive' areas, you can refuse to believe otherwise until you're shown incontrovertible proof. But a more neutral position would just be to accept the balance of probabilities.
You're welcome to go through Campbell's book (or Kaufman's classification which he uses) and see how many are Amazonian. Probably quite a lot-- the major diversity is in South America.Salmoneus wrote:But there is a big difference between a) i) number of language families in total (i.e. including each isolate or cluster of little-spoken related languages as a new family) and ii) number of dominant families in an area (i.e. taking the area as a whole and leaving occasional isolated valleys and creeks to one side), and b) i) 'the Americas' and ii) 'Amazonia'.zompist wrote: The problem is that linguists have tended to find what they were looking for, which is big IE-style families. Lumping is exciting and splitting is not, but Greenberg's overreach has caused a lot of reexamination, and a lot of the lumping was shoddy work. Thus Campbell's book listing over a hundred language families in the Americas.
Very briefly, I think you're not examining where your "default" expectation of language family diversity comes from. A lot of well-known families are not anywhere as solid as they are often presented. More work, as they say, needs to be done.Well sure, if you want to assume there aren't any large language families in 'primitive' areas, you can refuse to believe otherwise until you're shown incontrovertible proof. But a more neutral position would just be to accept the balance of probabilities.Further work will undoubtedly lower the number, but we can't unduly anticipate.
"Probablies" aside, the major diversity is in the mountains in western and northern south america. Amazonia is dominated by the Tupian, Cariban, and Maipurean families, each comprising dozens of languages (Macro-Je dominates adjacent eastern brazil). Specifically in relatively small area of the upper amazon, there are also the Puinavean, Tucanoan and Chapakuran families, each with about a dozen language - Chapakuran is widely thought to be related to Maipurean, and Puinavean and Tucanoan are sometimes thought to be related to one another (although this probably isn't true). There are no other families in Amazonia with more than a handful of members. There are a couple of dozen isolates and small families - but it's worth pointing out, these are almost all at the very extremities of the region (i.e. overwhelmingly in Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela, rather than in Brazil).zompist wrote:You're welcome to go through Campbell's book (or Kaufman's classification which he uses) and see how many are Amazonian. Probably quite a lot-- the major diversity is in South America.Salmoneus wrote:But there is a big difference between a) i) number of language families in total (i.e. including each isolate or cluster of little-spoken related languages as a new family) and ii) number of dominant families in an area (i.e. taking the area as a whole and leaving occasional isolated valleys and creeks to one side), and b) i) 'the Americas' and ii) 'Amazonia'.zompist wrote: The problem is that linguists have tended to find what they were looking for, which is big IE-style families. Lumping is exciting and splitting is not, but Greenberg's overreach has caused a lot of reexamination, and a lot of the lumping was shoddy work. Thus Campbell's book listing over a hundred language families in the Americas.
...so why are you doing that? You're attacking the whole linguistic establishment by waving around Dixon and shouting "eurocentrism!" - forgive me if I do not find this convincing.Very briefly, I think you're not examining where your "default" expectation of language family diversity comes from. A lot of well-known families are not anywhere as solid as they are often presented. More work, as they say, needs to be done.
But when you get to building straw men and slinging mud at linguists you haven't read, well, that's not an interesting conversation to continue.
As far as I know, no one's saying that it was always inhabitable before suddenly getting cold recently. What I meant was that there have been people living in the inhabitable parts of Siberia whenever they've been, well, inhabitable. Although I couldn't find any firmly established, consistent information on what areas were entirely free of ice and at what points in time, it generally seems like there were at least some patches or more left un-iced even during the ice age. Sure, most of those places were obviously still not going to sustain life well enough to be settled permanently, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were entirely vacant. Also, the ice age didn't end overnight, so it makes sense for people to have moved wherever they could as soon as they could. That would've been around 15 000 years ago or something.Salmoneus wrote:Regarding Siberia: no, it was barren. As in, completely, utterly uninhabitable. Same as Europe. We do know that it wasn't a green a verdant land that only recently got cold, because we have science.
Do you mean 'peacefully' as with head-hunters? Small-scale warfare is endemic amongst humans, even it seems more natural when there is somewhere to keep trophies.Vlürch wrote:Some of them were related to the languages that still exist today even if the majority of their sister languages have gone extinct, and naturally the separation from one another and contact with other languages influenced them in different ways. There's no reason to think that they couldn't have coexisted peacefully, is there?
Indeed. The thing about primitive violence is that it's horrendously violent because it's constant, not because it's apocalyptic. In these societies, somewhere between 1/5 and 1/2 men were murdered/executed/sacrificed/killed-in-war, depending on the group, plus a sizeable number of women. But these weren't wars of conquest, so that only rarely resulted in the extinction of any tribes - a 50% chance of being murdered during your lifetime isn't the same as 50% of the population being murdered overnight. The high birthrate could compensate for it (and indeed, since everyone was being slaughtered at the same rate of holocaust, nobody would have had the manpower necessary to actually wipe anybody out... I wonder how much of the relatively easy expansion of more civilised societies was simply a matter of reducing their own death rate enough to be able to mobilise much larger armies from the same resources...)Xephyr wrote:Presumably languages can coexist peacefully even if their speakers don't. Otherwise you'd never get New Guinea.